Call it a study in failed tourism: in four expeditions into urban Abu Dhabi in search of specific destinations, I got lost and gave up before getting there three times. The problem — at least, its a problem for us New Yorkers; I’m sure it makes perfect sense to Abu Dhabi residents –– is that the buildings in the city have no street addresses. The email sign-offs of MEIFF employees state the address of their office as “Abu Dhabi Film Centre, next to Abu Dhabi TV, opposite Rosary School.” Locals find things by referring to landmarks: schools, malls, hotels or, in the absence of a structure that takes up a city block or more, usually a fast food place, apparently most commonly a KFC. My adventures getting repeatedly lost in this system sort of puts a new spin on my Das Racist analogy from earlier in the week: in a city that has erased most visible traces of its pre-1970s, Bedouin history to make way for global capitalism, the only commonly understood landmarks left are a product of that economic eagerness. And, of course, mosques.

Even after days of curious and ultimately confused wandering, including a trip to The Largest Mosque in the Arab World where I was harshly scolded by security guards every time my bangs fell out of my loose-fitting borrowed shayla, the place I felt most like a tourist in Abu Dhabi was in a movie theater. From the moment I got off the plane in Abu Dhabi, Blue had been billed to me as the hot ticket of the film festival. A Bollywood caper starring Indian superstars Sanjay Dutt and Akshay Kumar and former Miss Universe Lara Dutta, and featuring music by Slumdog Millionaire Oscar winner A. R. Rahman and Kylie Minogue, the film’s sole Gala screening drew a sample of Abu Dhabi’s large South Asian population apparently starved for a glimpse of famous faces. Judging from the lengthy line that snaked through the Emirates Palace before the screening, there was much more popular demand for Blue than for any of the Hollywood features or international indies given similar Gala treatment.

The pre-screening intro was total chaos. Calling Blue “one of the most eagerly anticipated films ever made” (it’s also reportedly the most expensive Bollywood production of all time), Peter Scarlett allowed director Anthony D’Souza to bring Rahman and the film’s actors out on stage one by one. Each star — including the composer — said a few words, all barely intelligible over the roar of the crowd, but most just stood there smiling blankly as the fans who rushed the stage with their digital cameras snapped and shouted. There was snapping in the seats, too — the guy sitting next to me picked a fight with the men sitting in the row in front of us. On their feet cheering each star’s arrival, they were blocking his view.

The spectacle of such moviegoer devotion is always appreciated, but without an emotional connection to its stars (I had no idea who any of the people on stage were aside from Rahman), Blue itself is easy to dismiss. Over-extended at less than two hours, the film plays something like a partially-underwater Fast and Furious, with musical numbers, and as it’s got all the narrative coherence that this mashup of genres would imply, it seems pointless to run down the plot. Let’s just say it’s about a badass young Indian bike racer (Zayed Khan) who gets into trouble in and flees to Bermuda, where he hooks up with his staid older brother (Dutt), the brother’s drop dead gorgeous wannabe marine biologist girlfriend (Dutta), and a multi-millionaire super-badass who devotes half his waking hours to trying to convince the brothers to go on a deep sea dive to find an infamous sunken treasure, and the other half bragging about having threesomes. One liners, explosions, suggestive underwater dance numbers about loyalty and action stagings directly lifted from Hollywood blockbusters follow. Is it any wonder the last dialogue exchange sets up a sequel?

In fact, Blue has got all the stylistic hallmarks of Bad Hollywood Action Film: incoherently cut action scenes that more often than not resolve in fire, entire scenes in which the camera seems to have been placed to ensure that all women will be cut off at the waist so that the viewer is free to contemplate their legs and asses without having to assign these features to a specific character, and virtual wall to wall verbal and visual double entendre — as if we might forget that this entire enterprise is really about virility. The musical numbers are essentially super-narrative stand-alone interludes, such as the introduction of Dutta via a sequence that resembles an Esther Williams romance number updated for the age of Sports Illustrated-as-softcore, with dolphins. And yet for all the trainspotting its referentiality inspires, there’s a playfulness to Blue’s imagery that is rare in North American tentpole films. It essentially pulls off a more realist version of what Speed Racer aimed to do, in that the true subject of each of the street racing scenes isn’t the race or even the machinery fetishism, but the visualization of speed through the distortion of space, light and color. The story has to be sparse, because spectacle comes first … and maybe second, third, and fourth.

Bollywood has a long tradition of remaking Hollywood films (the one small local cinema I encountered in Abu Dhabi was showing two Bollywood films, one an apparent remake of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves), but Blue doesn’t feel like a simple wrapping of one culture’s commercial entertainment in the tropes of another’s, so much as a conscious effort to hybridize and eventually equalize the two. This is a film in which characters slip seamlessly from speaking Hindi to speaking English, but only when they want to emphasize the gravity of a given situation, and/or their own dominance within it. The Kylie cameo (the bulk of which is embedded above) is an interesting example of how Blue spells out its intention to show us East meeting West, painlessly but not without ground lost by the latter. There she is, a blinding light in silver-white mini-dress, performing a nightclub act flanked by men in gold lame Hammer pants and Don Draper hats, only interrupted when Kumar comes crashing in on a giant chandelier. The scene soon evolves from staged performance shot like a music video, into something much looser and open, a lot of it shot verite style from within, The Western icon is not knocked off her pedastal, but is forced to share it, ceding to the East’s ever-increasing ease at playing on the Western stage. It’s no wonder two of the men do a fist bump to celebrate a mission accomplished: there couldn’t be a more fitting cultural appropriation than this gestural embodiment of America’s own social/racial/generational upheaval in progress.